• Hitting an Invisible Target in TB Vaccine Design

    I have a troubled relationship with Twitter. It’s an unredeemable hate sort of thing. I’m generally an inane mix of angry opinion and low self-esteem so, in theory, we’re perfect for each other. I just don’t feel it, though. I had a quick look for online videos in the same vein of the YouTube...
  • Rebranding Tuberculosis

    If infectious diseases were monsters, what would they look like? I imagine malaria would be a terrible mosquito-like creature made of bones, with a wickedly sharp proboscis and a throbbing gut of fiery red blood. Diarrhoeal disease would rise from a swamp of sewage, grinning with its skull’s jaw...
  • Natural isn't always harmless, especially if you are a rhino

    At this time of year, the Kruger National Park in South Africa reaches temperatures of up to 38 degrees Celsius. This has nothing to do with the subject of this post, but I thought I would use it to illustrate one of my newly recognised great discoveries of the 20th century—in-car...
  • Lag phase adapts bacteria to new environments

    Forgotten to defrost the chicken overnight in the fridge? That’s fine—you can leave it to thaw at room temperature, right? It will be quicker, after all… But, within just a few hours, the tiny bacteria hiding in frozen food such as chicken, beef or that left over Chinese takeaway can start to...
  • Middle of the Road Pays for Pathogens

    To understand why infectious diseases make us ill, it helps to consider disease from the pathogen’s point of view. Bacteria, viruses and parasites did not evolve simply to cause illness and suffering; virulence is simply a by-product of a pathogen’s fight for survival. Because an infectious...
  • Anthropomorphism Gone Wild

    One of my pet hates? Cartoon animals with breasts (I'm opening myself up for some horrendous Google searches, aren't I?). Let's take Madagascar III as an example. All the animals in the first two iterations are relatively animal-like (other than the, you know, part where they can talk)....

Wednesday, 28 December 2011

I’ve never, ever seen anything quite like the film 'Mars Needs Moms'. Maybe I should have known in advance that  a Disney animation was unlikely to do a good job of portraying mothers in a realistic manner (their mother-prototype tends to be of the dead variety). But I was surprised by just how anti-feminist this film...

Thursday, 22 December 2011

...that I wish I could tell my younger self: 1. It’s not going to be easy or, at least, it won’t feel easy. At some point, you’re probably going to start doubting everything about yourself, from your ability to generate high-quality data to whether that old lady on the bus moved seats because the stench of E. coli DH5a has...

Wednesday, 14 December 2011

On your marks, get set…and polymerise your actin microfilaments. The results of the first ever World Cell Race are in and crawling into first place was a fetal bone marrow stem cell with a blistering top speed of 5.2 microns per minute. Fifty labs from around the world fielded athletes, who competed over a distance of 400...

Tuesday, 13 December 2011

Awaking in the middle of the night, every tiny sound—a creaking floorboard, the drip of a tap, the quiet breathing of the murderer hiding in the wardrobe—can appear magnified. Yet, during the day, when background noise is higher, we don’t notice these same sounds. It’s not that they aren’t there, or even that other sounds are drowning...

Thursday, 8 December 2011

Babies are notoriously selfish creatures - either they're asleep, happy, or they're screaming. It isn't until the age of two that children begin to realise that other people have their owns wants and needs. However, a recent study from researchers at Durham University has demonstrated that infants as young as six-months old...

Tuesday, 6 December 2011

Scientific data is more freely available than ever. But does the push for openness help or hinder science? A panel debate at Imperial College London on 6th December sought to answer this question, launching the latest edition of Index on Censorship magazine—a special issue focussing on science, transparency and free speech....